"I’m sick of this High school, with suits on, called the Democratic and Republican parties.”
-Sean Penn
Me too, Sean! This ain't no fast times at Ridgemont High!
This is NOT America!
Actor, filmmaker and activist Sean Penn gave a passionate speech (click here to watch) at the “Open the Debates Super Rally” August 27, which ran parallel the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He demanded that 2008 presidential candidate Ralph Nader be included in the presidential debates and persuasively asked us to not be media’s pawns any longer with this failed One Party System.
“So, the question is, are we going to fight for the public discourse of facts? Or will we be shamed into hiding? Not only by the O’Reilly’s and the Limbaugh’s and the Hannitys, but also by the confident disparaging of thought handed down by the James Carvilles of the mainstream media.”
Read the transcript of Sean Penn’s speech courtesy The Liberty Voice here.
In his speech, he asks us to see through the ugly prism of what “co-opted thought” looks like as he compares the growing rabid strain of intolerance, unacceptance, hatefulness and incivility toward one another, against original thinking and against the majority of Americans who are “not in the club.”
In Penn’s opening remark’s, he referred to the DNC as “the Prom.” How he got that right…Some people, it seems, never got out of that “what’s everybody else wearing today” and “it’s hip to hate and bully” high school huddling at the lockers mentality as our media and blogosphere increasingly expose a hateful and non-communal “me-tooism” hubris that, as Sean understands so well, would have Dr. Martin Luther King “clawing at his casket”:
“When we are told not to vote for someone because he or she is a spoiler, let’s remember that Barack Obama himself is considered the greatest spoiler of all– by a narcissistic branch of democrats who simply have forgotten their manners, a slip of hubris which most certainly has Dr. King clawing at his casket.”
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear… What I also know, not from life’s lessons but from the heart, is that no matter what another person’s individual beliefs, background and affiliation including religious, socioeconomic or other, the hallmark of civil society (read civilization) is dependent upon personal character, integrity and tolerance. It is to respect the social contract of affording others the same common decency and respect that we would expect. But these days, our gatekeeping MSM who works tirelessly to distract us and keep real issues from us and the progressive blogosphere who initially banded together to challenge the status quo is coming undone, turning into the hateful, petty people crawling all over it that they set out to “change.”
It reminds me of the homely wisdom in the last lines of Burns' To a Louse,
"O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us."
A fitting prayer for all of us, media's pawns, might be something like this:
"O would some Power the boon bestow / To face the truths we still don't know."
But the record of the Democrats since the 90’s is discouraging. True environmentalists (attitudes and uses of the earth, her beauties, abundance, and destructible resources) and social scientists must be disgusted with the output of the executive and bicameral legislative branches - not to mention certain output of the imbalanced judiciary working hard with corporate America to screw the rest of us.
The really sad thing for all of us -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents --- must be the ongoing slippage of our once and promising democratic republic into an out-and-out capitalistic, military empire, the one both Obama and McCain BOTH have signed onto. The metamorphosis is undeniable and neither major party dares face or voice that conclusion.
Perhaps loss of Empire is where all of this hopeless, mindless, bullying and cat tail-spinning from the Left derives its increasing hostility and call for censorship amongst themselves. Penn reminds us of how a large pool of Democrats has fallen for the proven Rovian “divide and conquer” tactic to once again bring the party down on its own sword:
“In their defiance to the American voter– like little kids losing a game, they take the ball from the field and switch their allegiance to the man who would be George Bush the Third, John McCain.”
An Empire occupies and commandeers other lands and sovereignties as needed or desirable (with a good deal of killing and displaced refugees, whether at home and/or abroad) at the reduction of its own citizenry to pawns, paupers, and peasantry. That, my friends, is history seen and predictable.
But this loss of civility and media censorship going unchallenged is the saddest emblem its pathetic high-school mentality soldiers can wield in this race to the bottom. As Sean Penn sums up, we must demand equal participation for candidates in the presidential debates:
“Let’s demand to hear all the voices for change that represent the needs of all Americans. We must demand it in our media. We must demand it of John McCain. We must demand it from Barack Obama."
-2Truthy
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